administrative reforms, we may notice in passing his assiduity in
watching for the smaller opportunities of making life easier to the
people of his province. His private benevolence was incessant and
marked. One case of its exercise carries our minds at a word into the
very midst of the storm of fire which purified France of the evil and
sordid elements, that now and for his life lay like a mountain of lead
on all Turgot's aims and efforts. A certain foreign contractor at
Limoges was ruined by the famine of 1770. He had a clever son, whom
Turgot charitably sent to school, and afterwards to college in Paris.
The youth grew up to be the most eloquent and dazzling of the Girondins,
the high-souled Vergniaud. It was not, however, in good works of merely
private destination that Turgot mostly exercised himself. In 1767 the
district was infested by wolves. The Intendant imposed a small tax for
the purpose of providing rewards for the destruction of these
tormentors, and in reading the minutes on the subject we are reminded of
the fact, which was not without its significance when the peasants rose
in vengeance on their lords two and twenty years later, that the
dispersion of the hamlets and the solitude of the farms had made it
customary for the people to go about with fire-arms. Besides encouraging
the destruction of noxious beasts, Turgot did something for the
preservation of beasts not noxious. The first veterinary school in
France had been founded at Lyons in 1762. To this he sent pupils from
his province, and eventually he founded a similar school at Limoges. He
suppressed a tax on cattle, which acted prejudicially on breeding and
grazing; and he introduced clover into the grass-lands. The potato had
been unknown in Limousin. It was not common in any part of France; and
perhaps this is not astonishing when we remember that the first field
crop even in agricultural Scotland is supposed only to have been sown in
the fourth decade of that century. People would not touch it, though
the experiment of persuading them to cultivate this root had been
frequently tried. In the Limousin the people were even more obstinate in
their prejudice than elsewhere. But Turgot persevered, knowing how
useful potatoes would be in a land where scarcity of grain was so
common. The ordinary view was that they were hardly fit for pigs, and
that in human beings they would certainly breed leprosy. Some of the
English Puritans would not eat potatoes because they are not mentioned
in the Bible, and that is perhaps no better a reason than the other.
When, however, it was seen that the Intendant had the hated vegetable
served every day at his own table, the opposition grew more faint; men
were at last brought to consent to use potatoes for their cattle, and
after a time even for themselves.
It need scarcely be said that among Turgot's efforts for agricultural
improvement, was the foundation of an agricultural society. This was the
time when the passion for provincial academies of all sorts was at its
height. When we consider that Turgot's society was not practical but
deliberative, and what themes he proposed for discussion by it, we may
believe that it was one of the less useful of his works. What the
farmers needed was something much more directly instructive in the
methods of their business, than could come of discussions as to the
effects of indirect taxation on the revenues of landowners, or the right
manner of valuing the income of land in the different kinds of
cultivation. 'In that most unlucky path of French exertion,' says Arthur
Young, 'this distinguished patriot was able to do nothing. This society
does like other societies; they meet, converse, offer premiums, and
publish nonsense. This is not of much consequence, for the people
instead of reading their memoirs are not able to read at all. They can,
however, _see_, and if a farm was established in that good cultivation
which they ought to copy, something would be presented from which they
_might_ learn. I asked particularly if the members of this society had
land in their own hands, and was assured that they had; but the
conversation presently explained it. They had _metayers_ round their
country seats, and this was considered as farming their own lands, so
that they assume something of a merit from the identical circumstance,
which is the curse and ruin of the whole country.'
The record of what Turgot did for manufacturing industry and commerce is
naturally shorter than that of his efforts for the relief of the land
and its cultivators. In the eyes of the modern economist, with his
horror of government encouragement to industry, no matter in what time,
place, or circumstance, some of Turgot's actions will seem of doubtful
wisdom. At Brives, for example, with all the authority of an Intendant,
he urged the citizens to provide buildings for carrying on a certain
manufacture which he and others thought would be profitable to the town;
and, as the money for the buildings did not come in very readily, he
levied a rate both on the town and on the inhabitants of the suburbs.
His argument was that the new works would prove indirectly beneficial to
the whole neighbourhood. He was not long, however, in finding out, as
the authors of such a policy generally find out, how difficult it is to
reconcile the interests of aided manufactures with those of the
taxpayers. It is characteristic, we may remark, of the want of public
spirit in the great nobles, that one of Turgot's first difficulties in
the affair was to defeat an unjust claim made by no less a personage
than the Marshal de Noailles, to a piece of public land on which the
proposed works were to be built. A more important industry in the
history of Limoges sprang from the discovery, during Turgot's tenure of
office, of the china clay which has now made the porcelain of Limoges
only second among the French potteries to that of Sevres itself. The
modern pottery has been developed since the close of the Revolution,
which checked the establishments and processes that had been directed,
encouraged, and supervised by Turgot.
To his superior enlightenment in another part of the commercial field we
owe one of the most excellent of Turgot's pieces, his Memorial on Loans
of Money. This plea for free trade in money has all the sense and
liberality of the brightest side of the eighteenth century illumination.
It was suggested by the following circumstance. At Angouleme four or
five rogues associated together, and drew bills on one another. On these
bills they borrowed money, the average rate of interest being from
eight to ten per cent. When the bills fell due, instead of paying them,
they laid informations against the lenders for taking more than the
legal rate of interest. The lenders were ruined, persons who had money
were afraid to make advances, bills were protested, commercial credit
was broken, and the trade of the district was paralysed. Turgot
prevailed upon the Council of State to withdraw the cases from the local
jurisdiction; the proceedings against the lenders were annulled, and the
institution of similar proceedings forbidden. This was a characteristic
course. The royal government was generally willing in the latter half of
the eighteenth century to redress a given case of abuse, but it never
felt itself strong enough, or had leisure enough, to deal with the
general source from which the particular grievance sprang. Turgot's
Memorial is as cogent an exposure of the mischief of Usury Laws to the
public prosperity, as the more renowned pages either of Bentham or J. B.
Say on the same subject, and it has the merit of containing an
explanation at once singularly patient and singularly intelligent, of
the origin of the popular feeling about usury and its adoption by the
legislator.
After he had been eight years at his post, Turgot was called upon to
deal with the harassing problems of a scarcity of food. In 1770 even the
maize and black grain, and the chestnuts on which the people supported
life, failed almost completely, and the failure extended over two years.
The scarcity very speedily threatened to become a famine, and all its
conditions were exasperated by the unwisdom of the authorities, and the
selfish rapacity of the landlords. It needed all the firmness and all
the circumspection of which Turgot was capable, to overcome the
difficulties which the strong forces of ignorance, prejudice, and
greediness raised up against him.
His first battle was on an issue which is painfully familiar to our own
Indian administrators at the present time. In 1764, an edict had been
promulgated decreeing free trade in grain, not with foreign countries,
but among the different provinces of the kingdom. This edict had not
made much way in the minds either of the local officials or of the
people at large, and the presence of famine made the free and
unregulated export of food seem no better than a cruel and outrageous
paradox. The parlement of Bordeaux at once suspended the edict of 1764.
They ordered that all dealers in grain, farmers of land, owners of land,
of whatever rank, quality, or condition, should forthwith convey to the
markets of their district '_a sufficient quantity_' of grain to
provision the said markets. The same persons were forbidden to sell
either by wholesale or retail any portion of the said grain at their own
granaries. Turgot at once procured from the Council at Versailles the
proper instrument for checking this impolitic interference with the free
circulation of grain, and he contrived this instrument in such
conciliatory terms as to avoid any breach with the parlement, whose
motives, for that matter, were respectable enough. In spite, however,
of the action of the government, popular feeling ran high against free
markets. Tumultuous gatherings of famishing men and women menaced the
unfortunate grain-dealers. Waggoners engaged in carrying grain away from
a place where it was cheaper, to another place where it was dearer, were
violently arrested in their business, and terrified from proceeding.
Hunger prevented people from discerning the unanswerable force of the
argument that if the grain commanded a higher price somewhere else, that
was a sure sign of the need there being more dire. The local officials
were as hostile as their humbler neighbours. At the town of Turenne,
they forbade grain to be taken away, and forced the owners of it to sell
it on the spot at the market rate. At the town of Angouleme the
lieutenant of police took upon himself to order that all the grain
destined for the Limousin should be unloaded and stored at Angouleme.
Turgot brought a heavy hand to bear on these breakers of administrative
discipline, and readily procured such sanction as his authority needed
from the Council.
One of the most interesting of the measures to which Turgot resorted in
meeting the destitution of the country, was the establishment of the
Charitable Workshops. Some of the advocates of the famous National
Workshops of 1848 have appealed to this example of the severe patriot,
for a sanction to their own economic policy. It is not clear that the
logic of the Socialist is here more remorseless than usual. If the State
may set up workshops to aid people who are short of food because the
harvest has failed, why should it not do the same when people are short
of food because trade is bad, work scarce, and wages intolerably low? Of
course Turgot's answer would have been that remorseless logic is the
most improper instrument in the world for a business of rough
expedients, such as government is. There is a vital difference in
practice between opening a public workshop in the exceptional emergency
of a famine, and keeping public workshops open as a normal interference
with the free course of industrial activity. For the moment the
principle may appear to be the same, but in reality the application of
the principle means in the latter case the total disorganisation of
industry; in the former it means no more than a temporary breach of the
existing principles of organisation, with a view to its speedier
revival. To invoke Turgot as a dabbler in Socialism because he opened
_ateliers de charite_, is as unreasonable as it would be to make an
English minister who should suspend the Bank Charter Act in a crisis,
into the champion of an inconvertible paper currency. Turgot always
regarded the sums paid in his works, not as wages, but as alms. All that
he urged was that 'the best and most useful kind of alms consists in
providing means for earning them.' To prevent the workers from earning
aid with as little trouble to themselves as possible, he recommended
payment by the piece and not by the day. To check workers from flocking
in from their regular employments, he insisted on the wages being kept
below the ordinary rate, and he urged the propriety of driving as sharp
bargains as possible in fixing the price of the piece of work. To
prevent the dissipation of earnings at the tavern, he paid not in money,
but in leathern tokens, that were only current in exchange for
provisions. All these regulations mark a wide gulf between the Economist
of 1770 and the Socialist of 1848. Nobody was sterner than Turgot
against beggars, the inevitable scourge of every country where the evils
of vicious economic arrangements are aggravated by the mischievous views
of the Catholic clergy, first, as to the duties of promiscuous
almsgiving, and second, as to the virtue of improvident marriages. In
1614 the States General had been for hanging all mendicants, and Colbert
had sent them to the galleys. Turgot was less rigorous than that, but he
would not suffer his efforts for the economic restoration of his
province to be thwarted by the influx of these devouring parasites, and
he sent every beggar on whom hands could be laid to prison.
The story of the famine in the Limousin brings to light some instructive
facts as to the temper of the lords and rich proprietors on the eve of
the changes that were to destroy them. Turgot had been specially anxious
that as much as possible of what was necessary for the relief of
distress should be done by private persons. He knew the straits of the
government. He knew how hard it would be to extract from it the means of
repairing a deficit in his own finances. Accordingly he invited the
landowners, not merely to contribute sums of money in return for the
public works carried on in their neighbourhood, but also, by way of
providing employment to their indigent neighbours, to undertake such
works as they should find convenient on their own estates. The response
was disappointing. 'The districts,' he wrote in 1772, 'where I have
works on foot, do not give me reason to hope for much help on the side
of the generosity of the nobles and the rich landowners. The Prince de
Soubise is so far the only person who has given anything for the works
that have been executed in his duchy.' Nor was abstinence from
generosity the worst part of this failure in public spirit. The same
nobles and landowners who refused to give, did not refuse to take away.
Most of them proceeded at once to dismiss their _metayers_, the people
who farmed their lands in consideration of a fixed proportion of the
produce. Turgot, in an ordinance of admirable gravity, remonstrated
against this harsh and impolitic proceeding. He pointed out that the
unfortunate wretches, thus stripped of every resource, would have to
leave the district, abandoning their wives and children to the charity
of villages that were already overburdened with the charge of their own
people. To cast this additional load on the villages was all the more
unjust, because the owners of land had been exempted from one-half of
the taxes levied on the owners of other property, exactly because the
former were expected to provide for their own peasants. It was a claim
less of humanity than of bare justice, that the landowners should do
something for men with whom their relations had been so close as to be
almost domestic, and to whose hard toil their masters owed all that they
possessed. As a mere matter of self-interest, moreover, apart alike from
both justice and humanity, the death or flight of the labourers would
leave the proprietors helpless when the next good season came, and for
want of hands the land would be doomed to barrenness for years to come,
to the grievous detriment no less of the landowners than of the whole
people of the realm. Accordingly, Turgot ordered all those who had
dismissed their _metayers_ to take them back again, and he enacted
generally that all proprietors, of whatever quality or condition, and
whether privileged or not, should be bound to keep and support until the
next harvest all the labourers who had been on their land in the
previous October, as well women and children as men.
Turgot's policy in this matter is more instructive as to the social
state of France, than it may at first sight appear. At first sight we
are astonished to find the austere economist travelling so far from the
orthodox path of free contract as to order a landowner to furnish at his
own cost subsistence for his impoverished tenants. But the truth is that
the _metayer_ was not a free tenant in the sense which we attach to the
word. '_In Limousin_,' says Arthur Young, '_the metayers are considered
as little better than menial servants_.' And it is not going beyond the
evidence to say that they were even something lower than menial
servants; they were really a kind of serf-caste. They lived in the
lowest misery. More than half of them were computed to be deeply in debt
to the proprietors. In many cases they were even reduced every year to
borrow from their landlord, before the harvest came round, such coarse
bread of mixed rye and barley as he might choose to lend them. What
Turgot therefore had in his mind was no relation of free contract,
though it was that legally, but a relation which partly resembled that
of a feudal lord to his retainer, and partly--as Sir Henry Maine has
hinted--that of a planter to his negroes. It is less surprising, then,
that Turgot should have enforced some of the responsibilities of the
lord and the planter.
The nobles had resort to a still more indefensible measure than the
expulsion of their _metayers_. Most of the lands in the Generality of
Limoges were charged with dues in kind payable to the lords. As the
cultivators had for the most part no grain even for their own bread,
they naturally had no grain for the lord's dues. The lords then insisted
on payment in cash, and they insisted on estimating this payment at the
famine price of the grain. Most of them were really as needy as they
were idle and proud, and nothing is so inordinately grasping as the
indigence of class-pride. The effect of their proceedings now was to
increase their revenue fourfold and fivefold out of public calamity and
universal misery. And unfortunately the liability of the cultivators in
a given manor was _solidaire_; they were jointly and severally
responsible, and the effect of this was that even those who were in
circumstances to pay the quadrupled dues, were ruined and destroyed
without mercy in consequence of having also to pay the quadrupled dues
of their beggared neighbours. Turgot arrested this odious process by
means of an old and forgotten decree, which he prevailed upon the
parlement of Bordeaux to revive in good and due form, to the effect that
the arrears of dues in kind for 1769 should be paid at the market price
of grain when the dues were payable; that is, before the scarcity had
declared itself.
When we consider the grinding and extortionate spirit thus shown in face
of a common calamity, we may cease to wonder at the ferocity with which,
when the hour struck, the people tore away privilege, distinction, and
property itself from classes that had used all three only to ruin the
land and crush its inhabitants into the dust. And the moment that the
lord had thus transformed himself into a mere creditor, and a creditor
for goods delivered centuries ago, and long since consumed and
forgotten, then it was certain that, if political circumstances favoured
the growing economic sentiment, there would be heard again the old cry
of the Roman plebs for an agrarian law and _novae tabulae_. Nay, something
was heard that is amazingly like the cry of the modern Irish peasant. In
1776 two noteworthy incidents happened. A certain Marquis de Vibraye
threw into prison a peasant who refused to pay the _droit de cens_.
Immediately between thirty and forty peasants came to the rescue, armed
themselves, besieged the chateau, took it and sacked it, and drove the
Marquis de Vibraye away in terror. Still more significant is the second
incident, which happened shortly after. A relative of the Duke of
Mortemart, shooting on his property, was attacked by peasants who
insisted that he should cease his sport. They treated him with much
brutality, and even threatened to fire on him and his attendants,
'_claiming to be free masters of their lands_.' Here was the main root
of the great French Revolution. A fair consideration of the details of
such an undertaking as Turgot's administration of the Limousin helps us
to understand two things: first, that all the ideas necessary for the
pacific transformation of French society were there in the midst of it;
second, that the system of privilege had fostered such a spirit in one
class, and the reaction against the inconsiderate manifestation of that
spirit was so violent in the other class, that good political ideas were
vain and inapplicable.
It is curious to find that, in the midst of his beneficent
administration, Turgot was rating practical work very low in comparison
with the achievements of the student and the thinker. 'You are very
fortunate,' Condorcet said to him, 'in having a passion for the public
good, and in being able to satisfy it; it is a great consolation, and of
a very superior order to the consolation of mere study.' 'Nay,' replied
Turgot, in his next letter, 'whatever you may say, I believe that the
satisfaction derived from study is superior to any other kind of
satisfaction. I am perfectly convinced that one may be, through study, a
thousand times more useful to men than in any of our subordinate posts.
There we torment ourselves, and often without any compensating success,
to secure some small benefits, while we are the involuntary instrument
of evils that are by no means small. All our small benefits are
transitory, while the light that a man of letters is able to diffuse
must, sooner or later, destroy all the artificial evils of the human
race, and place it in a position to enjoy all the goods that nature
offers.' It is clear that we can only accept Turgot's preference, on
condition that the man of letters is engaged on work that seriously
advances social interests and adds something to human stature. Most
literature, nearly all literature, is distinctly subordinate and
secondary; it only serves to pass the time of the learned or cultured
class, without making any definite mark either on the mental habits of
men and women, or on the institutions under which they live. Compared
with such literature as this, the work of an administrator who makes
life materially easier and more hopeful to the half-million of persons
living in the Generality of Limoges or elsewhere, must be pronounced
emphatically the worthier and more justly satisfactory.[44]
[Footnote 44: See vol. i. p. 290.]